Ars 'reviews' Haiku, and concludes that "at the end of the day, Haiku may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware on a rainy afternoon just for a bit of fun. But even if it amounts to no more than that, Haiku is still worth checking out." The article is a bit scant on content, but it does give me the opportunity to link to my review of Haiku alpha 1 from 3 years ago. I try Haiku every now and then to see if that review needs an update, but it always amounts to 'it got a bit more stable' - which is fantastic, but not a reason to redo it.

A number of network drivers, PCMCIA support (likely not around at the time of the Apple possible purchase though) and similar were either lifted wholesale from Linux with some vague code releases that didn't always compile and rarely gave compatible binaries; or licenced from their original copyright holders for the Linux version.

There was also Intel licenced code in the USB stack (again, later than the Apple era), Metrowerks licenced IDE, licenced MIDI stack, the 3D rendered, some other drivers were written and bought in from external sources.

What Be could have sold was about 80% of an OS with a lot of licencing issues to sort out.